Love's Lonely Offices : Robert Hayden and the African-American Literary Tradition

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The author asks "what is Black Literature"? The author explored the vexed question of Robert Hayden's poetry in the African-Aemrican literary community. By examining his poems in light of the Bahá'í holy texts, the author illuminates the philosophical matruix in which Hayden's work was conceived and the "universalist" impulse that animates his mature writing. The thesis interrogates Hayden's relationship to the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Hayden's work did not spark excitement comparable to that generated by iconic poets who flourished within the limits of black nationalism because the manifestation of his religious worldview did not correspond to the nation-specific agenda of the movenment. The dissertation takes a comparative look at Alain Locke, Amiri Baraka, and Gwendolyn Brooks to explain and question Hayden's peripheral position in relation to the most significant trend in postwar African-American cultural output as well as Hayden's absence from recent critical evaluations of the development of 20th-century Afircan-American literature.